


Rose With Thorns

by NoelleAngelFyre



Series: Tiger, Tiger [11]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canon/Original Character Relationships, F/M, Gen, Girls' Night Out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 09:51:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4701635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoelleAngelFyre/pseuds/NoelleAngelFyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iris and the Zsaszettes have a little bonding time out on the town.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rose With Thorns

**Author's Note:**

> For the sake of simplicity, I named two of the Zsaszettes. Hopefully the descriptions make it clear which one is which. Also, I'm not completely sure where the idea for this came from. I blame a lack of sleep. :)

“The girls” are not girls. At the very least, they are five years older than her. Far closer to Victor’s age than herself—though she has a suspicion one of them, the one in black leather pants and matching shirt with heavily-shadowed eyelids, is actually older than him, but that’s something she doesn’t even want to consider longer than necessary—and she is once again the youngest among the gathered. She can’t read their expressions very well, but she knows they are quite aware of the age difference and she can’t help but feel they feel this is more of a babysitting stint than it is a protective assignment. She should feel grateful to Victor, that he brought them here so she wouldn’t be alone. As it is, she has the supreme desire to slap him. Twice.

Two hours pass with the urgency of frozen sap leaking from a tree; she is in Victor’s bedroom, staring at the ceiling, and the girls—though, really, she has no idea why she’s calling them that when they are most certainly not _girls_ —are outside the small sitting area. She can hear the _tick, tick, tick_ of her watch like a church bell. It’s making her twitch. She can’t stand the silence. She can’t stand the loneliness. She can’t stand the fact she’s been placed on house arrest under the care—if it can be called as such—of three women she knows nothing about. 

Well, no, that’s not right. She does know that, for six months, these women had Victor all to themselves. She’s not stupid, or naïve. She knows exactly what Victor uses these women for, when they weren’t working together. It makes jealousy churn like acid in her stomach. She’s not sure who she’s more resentful towards, but Victor is definitely ranking high on the list. Part of her wonders if the other women feel this way, that he can so easily transition from one to the next to the next. Perhaps they do. Perhaps they simply choose not to call him out on such behavior. She fails to see the appeal of remaining silent and playing submissive. It simply isn’t her way.

At two hours and three minutes and fourteen seconds, she can’t take it anymore. Gotham is her home. She is not about to be frightened and cornered within its limits like a trapped mouse. Gotham is _her_ home. These people, the ones who think they can achieve some sort of victory over the dead by putting a bullet in her, will not leave her broken and terrified. She is not her father. She is not Marcus DeLaine. And she despises him more than they will ever know—more than they ever _could_ —for leaving this as her inheritance. She wishes he and Maria had been tossed in a pit and left for the worms and insects to devour.

One of the women, a dark-skinned woman wearing the most revealing of the three outfits and with a curious crimson streak through her short hair, makes some comment about how she should stay here, how it’s safer here. There is no real conviction in her voice, and Iris knows, by tone alone, these women are equally bored and despise being stationary. She sympathizes. They are used to being out, hunting once the sun goes down, enjoying the city and all it offers—illicit and otherwise—and to be restrained in this place…she understands. She really, truly does. And it’s enough to make her forget the earlier resentment. Not forgive, but momentarily forget.

“You three are to keep an eye on me, and I am to go nowhere without your company.” She answers, calmly and with some amusement at the intrigued looks on each face staring back at her. “Come with me, or do not. But _I_ am leaving.”

The petite dark-haired one, dressed in a rather fetching Lolita-style dress with vibrant red lips, declares she is starting to like Iris, and is the first to follow out the door. The others follow accordingly. They look amused, and intrigued, and, once they step out onto the street and the cool night air surrounds them, relieved. This is their time. This is their world.

In retrospect, Iris will perhaps wonder at herself tonight. She will look back and think it was perhaps the stress of the day’s events, or the way she is consistently regarded as a joke and a weak link and a whore by the people she works with and is meant to respect. Perhaps it is the intense, overwhelming, earth-shattering hatred she feels for her parents, every waking hour that she is reminded of them—hence the reasons she savors Victor’s company so much; he never reminds her of them, but is content to let her forget them, to even become a surrogate, of sorts, for them. He certainly was when she was growing up—or perhaps tonight is inspired by some obscure, irrational, ridiculous desire to make her lover truly see her as a woman, not a little girl, not a woman-child, but a true woman. Perhaps it is some combination of everything. She is just tired. She’s tired of the people around her, the people who pity her and mock her and humiliate her and want to kill her. She’s tired of them all.

The girls take to her impulsivity quite nicely. Yin, the petite in Lolita, says they will take her out for the evening. A girls’ night out, of sorts; Iris is familiar with the concept, but not exactly what it entails. But tonight, she is most certainly intrigued and doesn’t ask questions before giving her full consent. The dark-skinned woman, Tanesha, looks over the button-up blouse and professional slacks and declares an outfit change is warranted. Actually, she says, it is imperative. Where they’re taking her, that kind of attire is most definitely not appropriate. 

Logically speaking, the comment should be enough to snap her out of this juvenile mind-set and remind her who she is with and what reputation these women have throughout Gotham. It doesn’t. If anything, it encourages her. She doesn’t know the girls, but tonight she trusts them. She shouldn’t, but God help her, she does.

The blouse and slacks are left on the dressing room floor, without care and without displaying much in the way of common courtesy for the shop owners. She doesn’t care. The silk of her new dress clings jealously to every inch of skin it covers, and the night wind feels sweet against her exposed skin. Nothing scandalous, by comparison of what her companions are wearing, but if James were to see her, he might have a heart attack. Her legs are bare from the knee down, and the slit runs perilously high up one thigh; the neckline pays gracious homage to her bust, hinting but not revealing too much. A little girl would never wear this, and a little girl would never possess the body to wear it properly.

“Like a rose.” Yin murmurs, almost affectionately, as she drags pale fingers through Iris’ hair and musses it with casual elegance. “A rose with thorns.”

When she takes a final look at her reflection, making careful examination of her eyes—she has always loved her eyes; even in a family of blue eyes, hers stand out with their radiance, and Victor has many, many times looked deeply into her eyes while running his fingers through her hair, smoothing the black strands away for an unobstructed view—and the dark red shade she has painted across her lips. Black hair, blue eyes, white skin, and red. Red silk and red lips. _A rose indeed._

***

The girls take her to a club, one of the many scattered throughout Gotham’s more disreputable areas. This one is most certainly par for the course, with the black interior and black velvet upholstery, a first floor dedicated to dancing—a place to find the evening’s prospective mate and engage in foreplay with musical accompaniment—and a second floor dedicated to carrying out the desired consummation. The girls have certainly been here before; they are recognized by the mild-mannered bartender and a few of the patrons. Some of the latter take note of Iris as well; Tanesha slides an arm around her waist and tucks her close.

“This isn’t the place to find gentlemen.” She murmurs in Iris’ ear while guiding her to a place near the back, where the other two are already reclining on the velvet couches, and settling her between them. “It’s a dog den. But the music is decent, and the drinks are good.”

As if to prove her point, Tanesha orders her a glass of red wine—“To match the rest of you,” she says with a coy smirk, while handing her the drink—without any care for her age or the fact she shouldn’t be drinking. No one else seems to care, either. The bartender doesn’t ask questions, and none of the patrons are throwing questioning looks. This is a different world. Here, _illicit_ and _illegal_ are terms of endearment, not crimes to be punished.

The wine is dry, but sweet, and it settles warmly in her core with a tingle beneath her skin. The effects of alcohol are a little foreign—she knows, from watching Detective Bullock on a regular basis, it is possible to be a functioning alcoholic, and she certainly watched her parents drown themselves in drugs and liquor on a regular basis—but she likes the way it makes her feel. It relaxes her, saps away the tension and leaves her feeling blissful and comfortable. She can’t remember the last way she felt this way, ever.

They spend some time talking, about many things. She doesn’t know if it’s the wine, or her devil-may-care attitude, or something else, but her normal reservations toward other people are gone, tossed away, dissipated without a thought. She feels at ease with them. They are so very, very different from the rest of the female species. They celebrate their femininity, embrace their natural beauty and the darker desires of this world, without shame and without reservation. They hold other human beings in no regard, save a very select few. She feels no uncertainty or hesitation in telling them about her parents, because her parents are the reason she despises humanity with such intensity. She expresses a long-silenced sentiment that her father died too quickly, and her mother didn’t suffer long enough. Yin asks her what she would have done, had she possessed the power to change the way her parents died.

“My father should have broken, body and soul.” She answers, after a moment’s consideration. “He should have died a truly hollow shell without one remaining thread of dignity intact. And my mother…”

She takes a slow sip of her wine, finishing it off, and flicks her tongue over the rim to catch one last drop before settling back against the couch with a sigh. “My mother should have been taken inside the room—my special room, with all those pretty mirrors inside—and left to rot, surrounded by reflections of her body dissolving and degrading, bit by bit, piece by piece, day after day.”

Tanesha smiles, leans in close, and kisses her cheek. “I like you, baby girl.” She croons affectionately. “I like the way you think.”

It is new, to hear those words. No one likes the way she thinks. Edward finds it fascinating, but she doesn’t believe he _likes_ it. If anything, she is quite convinced he is a little disturbed, and concerned, and maybe even frightened. Very likely it is the latter. She scares people. She always has. Her complete lack of emotional response and harsh speech upset other girls in the home, when she was younger, and made her the freak and oddity amongst her classmates during school. Now, at the precinct, she is the freak once more, but this time she is the forbidden fruit, because she is beautiful and she is a woman, and there are many who salivate at the thought of having her in bed, but nothing more, nothing long-lived or beyond base lust, because she scares them. She has no reaction to the bodies in the morgue, regardless of the depth and depravity of the way in which the poor souls died. The Captain learned very quickly that she is never again to give the notification to families, because she does not connect emotionally and she does not spare details. She gives details when they didn’t ask for them. All of the details, save those which might be imperative to solving the case.

So, to hear someone likes the way she thinks, and to see from the look in their eyes that they are being very serious and not playing a strange game with her, is new. It is new, and it is exciting. It relaxes her even more. It steals away the anxiety and uncertainty she often has when being around people. She doesn’t feel as though she’s in the company of strangers anymore. She feels safe with these women. She feels comfortable and at ease.

The song changes; most of the music here is foreign to her, just as the taste of alcohol on her tongue. She partly blames the wine running through her veins, for the heat stirring within her veins and stealing inhibitions and making her pay attention to the beat. It’s a far cry from the classical, operatic melodies she often plays for entertainment and relaxation; this is the night-club scene, and the music is certainly not fit for ballroom dancing. She feels a tingle run unchecked through her limbs. She shouldn’t, because she doesn’t know how to dance, not in this setting, not on a formal dance floor, nowhere, not anywhere. She shouldn’t. She really shouldn’t. 

The music is so very different: fast-paced, erratic, almost violent in its frantic beat. It pulses hard and fast through her veins, almost a pulse across her skin, a dance partner in and of itself. She doesn’t know shame, because no one is paying mind with a critical eye. Most are engrossed in their individual partners, or in their attempts to seduce a mate. There are a few that watch her, from the sidelines, and she can feel the hunger in their gaze. She refuses to pay much consideration to it, because their desire disgusts her. It is for want of her body, nothing more. She wants none of it, none of them. She wants the one who desires her from years of raising her, bringing her from a worthless pit of existence, dragging her out of the hole where he found her and nurturing her back to life, day after day, year after year, until there was a rose in place of barren life. She wants the one who knows her and desires her for it.

“Don’t you know the dangers of tempting the devil, Iris?”

The voice in her ear and the hands clasping her shoulders send ripples of sensation through each nerve, and she slowly brings both hands up to entwine her fingers with his, tight against bare skin. “Some say the devil steals what he wants.” She answers with a soft whisper barely audible over the music around them. “Other says he seduces with fire in his touch, scalding away the virgin’s purity and innocence, leaving only a succubus who can match his desires.”

He hums thoughtfully in her ear, kissing a slow path up from her jaw to temple, then resting lips at her ear. “Is that what I’ve found tonight, then? A succubus ready to dance in the flames?”

She tilts her head to meet his gaze over her shoulder; she knows, without glimpsing her reflection, her eyes are dark and predatory, and the smile she’s wearing is dangerous and vicious, and he looks as though he wants to kiss her until neither of them can breathe. “Dance with me, my tiger.”

There is something intoxicating about this, about all of this. She can no longer blame the wine, because she doesn’t feel drunk—well, not on the alcohol, anyway—and she can’t blame some terrible influence from the other girls because she was one to start down this path and she never turned back, even when she had the chance. Were anyone from the precinct—Edward, James, Detective Bullock, any of them—to walk in, right now, they would not recognize her. They would think perhaps this woman looks very similar to Iris DeLaine, but it can’t be her. James especially; he would never believe Iris DeLaine would be in a place like this, in a dress like that, encased in the arms of Gotham’s own devil. He’d never believe it. No one would.

But she is. She is a woman. She is beautiful and alive and on fire. Her tiger’s mouth is on her skin and his teeth are grazing the slender line of her throat, down to the smooth shape of her shoulder. Occasionally, he marks her, pressing down enough to leave a bruise but never enough to break the skin. His front is fitted to her back, hands cold against her heated flesh, sliding and running unchecked over skin and silk alike, without shame, without control, without what most would call decency. It is illicit, in every possible meaning of the word, and she loves it. If this is what it means to be trapped, to be locked within her own intense, overwhelming need of something—some _one_ —then she is truly an addict. And there is no cure.

“Beautiful,” he breathes against her skin; one hand runs from her hip to the slit in her skirt and beneath fabric to find bare skin, “You are beautiful, my sweet one. Sinfully beautiful. Every man in this room would cut off his own hands, just for a chance to have them on you.”

“I’d sooner you be responsible for removing their hands.” She murmurs, letting her head fall back against his shoulder. His breath is cold. She must truly be burning alive. “Each of them, one by one. They want me, and they think they can have me. But they cannot.” She finds his wrist, wrapping fingers around his wrist and dragging his hand along her thigh, brazen, shameless. “I am yours.”

“Only mine.” His voice lowers, tone ragged and hoarse; she knows that tone. It is her tiger’s growl, when he has need of her, when his body seeks release and satisfaction. “ _Only_ mine.” 

His hand clenches around her thigh and his hips press forward. She doesn’t moan, but only barely. If she isn’t doing much to hide her wanting, he is doing absolutely nothing to hide his. “Always mine. My girl, my precious one…” his other arm locks around her waist, clutching urgently. “I killed him too quickly, too soon. He was going to offer you up like meat to his dogs. I should have taken my time with him.”

“No, no,” she whimpers, pride tossed aside in the wake of a burning need that’s threatening to rip her apart, from the inside out, “Do not speak that way, my tiger. Do not speak as though they warrant your touch and your attention. They are not grateful for it. They are repulsed and resentful, and I…I ache for it. I would fall to my knees and beg you for it. Do not waste it on the undeserving.”

“Oh, my sweet girl…” he croons, kissing a slow path from shoulder to neck, to her pulse, “Shhh. You’re mine. No one replaces you.”

 _No one can replace my tiger._ She wonders if he remembers those words. She’s certain he does, he must, else he would never speak these words, in this way, in this moment. No one replaces her, and no one replaces him. Never.

***

It is raining when they make their exit, slipping out the door without incident and further farewells. The chill hits her burning skin and she nearly moans. It’s cold, almost too cold, but not really. It feels good. It makes her feel alive. It soaks into her hair and slides down her skin and brings the silk to cling with fervent possession to her body. Whatever was previously left for the imagination is practically on display, beneath the street lamps and the neon lights adorning the club’s exterior.

She reaches for him, drawing him close, and then slips one hand beneath his sleeve and pushes it upward. He’s completed one set and begun another. The marks are still fresh, and the rain washes away lingering remnants of his blood on the skin. She traces them with one fingertip, slowly, thoughtfully, eyes following the movement in silence.

“There are others.”

“There will always be others.” Victor says; he has her nearly pinned to the alley wall, the brick rough and unkind against her skin, and he notices the discomfort very quickly. His jacket may be as damp as her clothes, but the fabric protects her skin, and she can’t help but smile at the gesture. “And they will all meet the same fate.”

She sighs quietly, bringing his hand to rest atop her cheek and then nuzzling into his palm. “You have always avenged me, my tiger. Defended me. Protected me as I was never protected in my youth. Do you protect me now, because I am still a child in your eyes? Or do you protect me as you would your mate? As you would a lover?”

The word is, perhaps, one she should have avoided using. But _lover_ does not—or at least, should not—apply to children. A man has a woman as his lover. Not a little girl.

She isn’t expecting a true answer. She’s asked him this before, years ago; he didn’t answer then, and he doesn’t answer now. It hurts, but she doesn’t press for it. He wants her, he needs to find release in her tonight, and she won’t deny him. At the very least, she knows he desires her as a woman. Whether or not he protects her as he would a woman, if he could ever love her as a woman, as his mate, as his one and only…she is obviously not meant to know tonight. Perhaps she is never meant to know.


End file.
